Greens need to keep the wolf from the door

The re-introduction of the wolf to Ireland is probably not high on anyone’s list of New Year’s resolutions. When Eamon Ryan floated the idea back in 2019, he quickly regretted it, and sought, you might say, to put that wolf to bed – though not in a little Red Riding Hood kind of way.

The issue reared its head again last week as the EU has been debating bringing back the wolf to the wilds in Europe. Green Party Minister of State for Land Use and Biodiversity Pippa Hackett – a native of these parts – was quick to muzzle any further discussion. She was quoted by The Irish Times as saying that Ireland’s ecosystem “isn’t yet capable of coping with wolves” and “they’d all be shot” if they were reintroduced. Whatever about readers of The Irish Times based in Ballsbridge, readers of the Western People require no further evidence to sustain that assertion.

But as we all know, the Greens are often damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Quick and all as Minister Hackett was to shut this down – though she didn’t rule it out in the future – this story will have been used by some to add to the perception of the Greens as kind of eccentric, ‘anti-rural’ people. If you cry wolf, and mean it in any way positively, you are sort of leading with your chin.

For as the great Kermit said, it isn’t easy being Green. It is made all the harder because there are very different views within the global Green movement about how to make a difference. Some see themselves as leading a process of evolutionary change within the system, and then there is the more radical view, which advocates for challenging the system more directly. The young people disrupting sports events, blocking roads and throwing soup at paintings are a well-known manifestation of that more radical edge – the strategy there is to shock, even frighten, people into action.

Eamon Ryan has championed the evolutionary approach. The idea is to get into government and use your leverage there to extract what you can on the environmental agenda. Many fair-minded people would conclude his and his party’s strategy has gained a lot for environmentalism.

But it comes with disadvantages, for if you take the view that it is best to bring people along with you, it makes it hard to effectively fight back against your critics.

And Lord there has been a lot of criticism and of crying wolf since the Greens entered government. That criticism – not least in this part of the world – has been at times ferocious. We hear voices all the time saying that the Greens are ‘anti-rural’, or claiming that they don’t understand us, or are against our way of life or whatever way you want to phrase it. There have been many ruder ways than any of those.

The Greens have – in the main – responded by placating their critics. They deny charges of being ‘anti-rural’, and they talk about the changes needed to address our environmental problems as an organic and positive process. Far from snarling, the tactic is to not frighten or even disturb the horses.

This was in some ways necessary with the party in government, trying to achieve its objectives. When certain voices in rural Ireland attack ‘the Greens’, their target of course is not the Greens: it is the voters of the Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael TDs who support them in government that they are after. Eamon Ryan knows this very well and knows that if he responded to every attack on the Greens as ‘anti-rural’, he would be drawing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael into a row that would make them very uncomfortable. To turn the other cheek is wiser when you are trying to govern, where you need some political stability to get some big things done.

But, with a year of elections coming up, there must be a lot of people in the Greens who wonder if this remains the right tactic. There must now be a case for the Greens to take the debate to their opponents, instead of reacting to their attacks with a form of wet blanket or plamás.

Why is this? Well, any political party, when deciding on a strategy for an election, has to think about who might actually vote for them.

So, who would cast their ballot for the Greens? Big farmers? Committed conservatives? All the other people who loudly denounce them every chance they get? If Ireland turned into a desert as a result of climate change, most of those people would drill for oil before they’d vote Green. The Greens should surely stop wasting their time coming into an election trying to mollify people whose minds are already made up, and who won’t be changing them any time soon.

Some in the Greens resist that: thinking that they would close themselves off to all sorts of groupings - and rural Ireland specifically - by attacking their critics. But most Green voters are located in places far from those critics. And as well, you know, ‘rural Ireland’ is full of people, who, in big-picture terms, think that the Green Party’s analysis is correct. Climate change is happening. If we don’t make serious changes, we are in big trouble. Even those who think that the Green Party’s solutions may not always be right recognise that they have a point.

There is a sizable constituency out there for that point of view. How many people are fed up listening to spokespersons of established interests say, ‘Yes yes we are in favour of sustainability, but not to this extent - yet?’ How many people sigh when they hear all the special pleadings from one group or another about how we cannot change roads, advantage cyclists, reduce speed limits, protect natural habitats, or demand higher standards on air or water quality, all because the people complaining make more money by not changing what they are doing, regardless of how it impacts the rest of us?

And yes, in more specific and harder terms, people who are concerned about wind turbines or solar panels or the planting of trees have a right to be heard and to have their views taken into account, but we also have to push on with solving the problems these things are designed to address, and not let objectors continually stall such processes.

The Greens should spend the time between now and the next election having it out with the representatives of those who don’t want change – whatever political hat or none they wear – about these issues.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael probably won’t like it, because if the Greens and the Rural Independents got into a row, both the Greens and the Rural Independents would in my opinion win more votes, albeit from different people. Would such a strategy be enough to save the seats of those Greens who are in peril, let alone win more seats? Maybe, and maybe not, but many would think such an approach would give them a better chance, and would certainly rally more people to their flag.

So, with elections coming up, the Greens have a decision to make: do they want to continue to play nice, or do they want to keep the wolf of electoral defeat from their door?